Eighth Circuit: Citizens do not have a right to film public officials in public
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True
> ...and not local people
Generally false.
How does this sort of thing happen? It's insanely dangerous when media channels just fabricate news that did not happen. You can see the effects here – the number of comments that are along the lines of "isn't the fascist police-state USA awful" is surprising. The statement in the headline is not even supported by the content of the article, let alone the judgement itself.
But fake news sadly FTW.
The main question I personally have is if can I still film anything and everyone on public property or has this been curtailed in some way shape or form.
As far as I see it, the author of the article leads you to believe that 'public' means 'any public space' when in fact the court was ruling about filming in 'public proceedings', which is completely different.
It's very short because the appeals court ruled that the district court was correct "without opinion".
Where in "Akins also argues that the district court erred by granting the motions todismiss and for summary judgment filed by the defendants and by denying his ownmotion for partial summary judgment" is there anything about filming anyone?
https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/missou...
Page 14, sections 4, 5, 6, and 7 are the incidents relevant to filming.
With respect to section 5, Akins filmed in the lobby, was asked to stop, and the person who asked him to stop was told that he was in the wrong for saying so. Section 6, he wasn't allowed into a media event because there wasn't a ton of space and he didn't have credentials. Section 7, he was posting video to the PD's and the city's Facebook pages and they removed the videos.
These are discussed on page 34, last paragraph. Seems like Akins is more interested in retaliation charges, and that's what the court is addressing here. The "he has no constitutional right to videotape any public proceedings he wishes to" seems a bit out of place as I re-read it, but I guess it's just establishing a baseline? I'm not sure what specifically the statement is meant to respond to.
The only thing that seems like public proceeding is the media event, and so in that context the judge is saying that I can't just bust in with a smartphone and say I have a constitutional right to record the event.
But again, the judgement wasn't at all about him filming public officials, only about whether or not the judge should've presided over the case.
How can you not want the glorious Mad Maxian apocalypse that country's inbred retards dream of? Are you part of the problem? Some kind of culturally inclusive transliberal? HOW DARE YOU! I HAVEN'T MARRIED MY SISTER FOR THIS!
And as a black person, it really feels like the obvious abuses of police power continue unabated. There's finally a parade of evidence showing just how egregiously the cops treat us, and that door is at risk of closing, if the SCOTUS affirms this over the other circuit's opinion.
And to you as well, I pose another question: if cops treat black people unfairly, is it because they assume any black person is just going to commit a crime? Or is it more unconscious, in that the income inequality in the black population makes police officers more likely to associate black people with low income? For the record, I think that regardless police response is racially motivated and that we can all work together to change that.
At least until we end racism, which should be any day now...
The Eighth Circuit didn't offer any opinion on the Constitutional questions (citing Rule 47B, affirmation without opinion), probably because they were irrelevant to the case. Akins wasn't arrested for filming police, in fact, according to the district court ruling, the police affirmed his right to film more than once.
Akins complained about several incidents of alleged police harassment and the district court ruled that the police acted reasonably. According to the District Court, his complaints and the court's ruling thereon included:
he was arrested for marijuana possession at a DUI checkpoint ("Akins admitted in deposition that the material may have been his marijuana."). During the arrest, a concealed, loaded gun was found in a holster under his shirt ("Akins said he did not [have a concealed carry permit] and that his attorney told him he did not need one to carry a gun in the car.");
he was handcuffed on the side of the road while an officer searched his car without permission, after he admitted he had a rifle in the back, while a weapons charge was pending against him;
he was pulled over by police and asked for ID ("The interaction lasted less than two minutes.")
he was arrested for driving without a license or proof of insurance, and for carrying a butterfly knife (which are apparently illegal in Missouri).
1: http://courtweb.pamd.uscourts.gov/courtwebsearch/mowd/BNJpmR...
Weird how governments do watch their citizens in public all the time, waving any privacy concerns with arguments of "public safety" or "national security". While at the same time they prosecute whoever is filming them at work.
At the same time, though, I believe that any adjudication based on individual rights would need to consider the totality. E.g. police officers from the outset are given substantial rights that infringe on our personal liberty ostensibly out of the belief that doing so will protect us against grater infringements of our personal liberty.
Being allowed to film them, then, while it may on a low level infringe on an officers individual rights, can also be seen as protecting the individual rights of others by providing oversight on the special rights police has been granted.
The officers have an easy out: They can surrender their special rights to infringe on others liberty, and we'll surrender any special rights to infringe on theirs.
For my part I think that whether you look at this from a common good or individual rights perspective, as long as you look at the totality, you can arrive at pretty much the same outcome.
Where you get a different outcome is in how you weight different rights up against each other, and how you determine the totality of infringement caused by different actions.
E.g. you could (and to be clear, I strongly disagree with what I'm about to describe) argue that the officers have a right to privacy or to avoid harassment or similar that outweigh the public concern over monitoring their use of their expanded powers if you see their potential to infringe on others rights as leading to less infringements on liberty than the infringements of officers rights by allowing them to be filmed.
Libertarians typically refer to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), where your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
It would be hard to argue that filming the officer violates the NAP, particularly since the officer is allowed to film another individual citizen, creating a parity of individual rights.
I see what you're trying to say about coming at the problem from different perspectives, but the individual liberty arguments are almost always going to be the simpler ones to reason about when starting from first principles. The common good arguments become subjective and ambiguous very quickly. Worse, the people making the collective arguments are almost always the ones with the power. Guess which arguments will win out most of the time.
As a left-libertarian, the NAP is the kind of sophistry that makes me not consider right libertarian truly libertarian, as taken to the extreme it can be used to actively deprive others of even the right to life, reducing liberty more than it increases it. (Most commonly is it used to protect property rights)
E.g. if I monopolise all sources of food, strict adherence to the NAP prevents you from using violence to prevent everyone else from starving to death.
The left-libertarian view would be that the right of life is far more essential to liberty than property rights - if you are dead there is no way you can be free -, and so if many are at the threat of starvation over your property rights, liberty is maximised by taking your property from you, even at the cost of your life if necessary, as your act of monopolising an essential resources is morally equivalent to violence against everyone deprived.
This is a common good argument and individual liberty argument at the same time.
This is a traditional left libertarian vs. right libertarian conflict:
The left libertarian view tends to be more favourable to assigning relative weight to rights and favour restrictions on one right to safeguard another.
To take your example, speed limits are small, relatively inconsequential restrictions on the individual liberty of many in favour of reducing a number of infringements of rights on wider society, the most important of which is safeguarding wider society's right to life.
That, to me, makes judicious evidence based use of speed limits a justified restriction on individual liberty.
I think that is key, though: However you word it - be it "common good" or "individual liberty" - what makes the bigger difference is that there are clear criteria (e.g. a hierarchy of importance of liberties) and an expectation of evidence based policy.
Getting politicians to accept evidence-based policy-making seems to be the biggest hurdle at present, as evidence-based policies would overturn a whole lot of legal restrictions that they believe wholly in the importance of no matter what the evidence says.
Again, I don't see any discussion about right-to-record. It's mostly a long list of why you can't sue prosecutors.
the key thing here is that this was a lawsuit by some guy against the police alleging damages from deprivation of rights (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983)
that is a very different situation from the police charging him with a crime for making recordings.
basically just more stupid ill-informed sensationalist journalism.
If you can find a different case involving Akins on July 25th you are welcome to link to it instead. http://media.ca8.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/opnByMM.pl?theMM=07&th...
http://courtweb.pamd.uscourts.gov/courtwebsearch/mowd/BNJpmR...
IANAL, but one interesting consequence of this ruling might be that it will embolden police since they can point to it as evidence that the right to film police is not clearly established and, even if the Supreme Court rules it's unconstitutional for police to prevent filming, the officers are still deserving of qualified immunity when preventing that constitutional right.
There is obviously nothing in the Constitution about recording public officials, and I assume there isn't a statute against it, so that means it's relying entirely on case precedent, right? Which I understand is still law, so I'm as baffled by the ruling as anybody, but I also feel that if I were taking this case on for the first time, I would find myself ruling that citizens don't have this right -- even though I would desperately hope and agree they very much should. Does anyone feel that if there was no case precedent, they would still believe they had this right due to freedom of "speech" (or something else)? What would be your legal justification?
Worth noting that this circuit is the outlier, if the assertion is indeed accurate.
But where is the "district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public"?
I scanned over the 8th Circuit's opinion, which mostly talks about why the recusal denial was okay in their opinion:
http://media.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/17/07/163555P.pdf
As well as dockets relevant to the case:
https://dockets.justia.com/docket/missouri/mowdce/2:2015cv04...
But I haven't seen anything relevant to the claim in the lede.
EDIT:
Looks like this has some of the language mentioned, starting on page 32. In particular, the last paragraph of page 34:
https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/missou...
> Further, he has no constitutional right to videotape any public proceedings he wishes to. See Rice v. Kempker...
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-8th-circuit/1380406.html
That's Rice v. Kempker. Part that the Akins ruling quotes:
> Because we hold that neither the public nor the media has a First Amendment right to videotape, photograph, or make audio recordings of government proceedings that are by law open to the public...
So, I'm not a lawyer or a judge, but it seems like the specific claim that the lede latched onto is much more narrow in scope. If a proceeding is public, it doesn't guarantee that anyone is allowed to come in and videotape it. I can't go to the Supreme Court and argue that I have a First Amendment right to take video in there.
Am I missing something? If I'm interpreting this correctly, this news article is outrageously inaccurate.
Here's another take on the story: much more nuanced and in line with what I've been reading in the dockets.
http://www.abc17news.com/news/top-stories/attorney-asks-fede...
They don't link to it in the article. This should be the link, it has a summary of the ruling with it.
Here in Germany it's legal to film police officers but they sometimes arrest you, beat you, damage or search your phone for it. (Source: witnessed all four kinds of events at demonstrations)
Even if a burglar enters your house, you may photograph him, but you cannot use that photo in court. You need to have a sign at the entry telling that you are doing video recordings on your property. Source: police information event.
Still, if you question authority, you need to be prepared. In this case I would recommend immediate upload of the material, so taking or damaging the phone wouldn't help them.
Any restrictions on how citizens protect their property in court should be gravely discouraged. This is just plain taking rights from citizens to award them to feudals (of which police is a member)
If your house has a door, unallowed entry is automatically "Hausfriedensberuch" unless under some limited circumstances. Still, you need a sign beside the door if you want to video record burglars and use that recording in court.
I think it's stupid, but that's the way it is, apparently.
I hope it's not their line when Last Judgement comes.
While I support the right to film public officials in public (which Akins did sometimes), it seems he takes his actions too far, to the annoyance of officers.
Perhaps the judge focused on these specific instances behavior, rather than a typical event of filming an arrest?
In this case, that could mean that a new law has been created that prevents citizens from filming the police. Unless the case reaches the Supreme Court and they make a contradictory ruling that is. But IANAL and I'm happy to be corrected.
Not potentially - each new verdict is law. All lower courts are bound by law to follow the precedent established by higher courts; in other words, this now applies to all public-camera-bla-bla-bla cases in the 8th circuit.
There is clear and established precedent for how courts can issue rulings that affect only a single case. Evidently that's not the case here.
Disclaimer, IANAL.